MoMA opens it vaults for American Modern'

"Woman at the Piano" (1920-24) by Elie Nadelman is part of the " American Modern" exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. (The Philip L. Goodwin Collection/Estate of Elie Nadelman/Museum of Modern Art) (Thomas Griesel, )

Gerald Murphy’s “Wasp and Pear” is about as comically pornographic as fruit can get, and a wall of Charles Burchfield is just eccentric enough to tip his scale toward the bizarre.

There is a grouping of figurative sculptures by Gaston Lachaise, Robert Laurent, Elie Nadelman and William Zorach. Nadelman’s truly original men and women are charming, quirky, radical and sublime. Bridging ancient and modern, low-brow and high-brow, American and European art, they make and steal this show.

I enjoyed “American Modern.” Had it been more directed, it could have made a case for the “American-ness” of these artists.

Compared to their European counterparts at MoMA, most of the Americans here look as if they’re playing catch-up -- as if they’re on the outside of “Modern” looking in.

An automobile graveyard is as melancholy as a battlefield. The Brooklyn Bridge races overhead like a freight train. And the interactions of figures, signage and architecture, though found, feel as organized and symbolic as those on cathedral tympana.

Evans’s profound, Depression-era portrait of the United States transcends documentary to become what Lincoln Kirstein, in the original essay for the show, called a “powerful monument to our moment.”

— “Walker Evans American Photographs” and “American Modern: Hopper to O’Keeffe” (opening Saturday) both run through Jan. 26, 2014 at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53rd St. Information: +1-212-708-9400;